Each year, the IT practice at the Corporate Executive Board puts together what we call the Vision for Infrastructure (VFI) roadmap. This roadmap is a collective view of IT professionals from leading organizations about what technologies they plan to adopt, when and why. We just published our fourth installment of the roadmap for 2012, which reflects input from 300 IT professionals at over 80 participating organizations. This year we included a total of 73 technologies which fall into 6 main categories: End-User Computing, Servers/Hosting, Storage, Security, Data Center Facilities and Network.

Across the coming weeks, I’ll share key findings from each specific area. For today, I offer four key trends from the overall roadmap that cut across multiple domain areas. Before getting any deeper, we should talk about the methodology used to create this roadmap. For the 73 technologies, we asked each IT professional for their responses to three categories of questions: A) whether/ when do they plan to adopt the specific technology at their organization, B) how they rate the value/business impact of the technology, and C) how they rate the risk of the technology. Value and risk are made up of multiple factors which are weighted to arrive at the final results. For instance, "value" of a technology includes factors such as capital cost efficiency, the effect on performance etc, while "risk of deployment" includes factors such as market place maturity risk, security risk, etc. We chose as the "year of adoption" for a technology the year when 50% or more of the participants said they would be adopting that technology at their companies.

Now, the four key trends from the overall roadmap:

Mobility is reaching a fever pitch and dominating investments across networks and end-user computing towers

Cloud computing technologies are gathering steam, but attention on integration is currently lacking

Organizations are targeting numerous technology innovations to keep spiraling storage volumes under control

Data center facility innovations are less prominent than in the early days of virtualization, with none of the tested technologies reaching critical mass

Do you agree with these trends? Have you seen them manifest in your organization?

Across the next several weeks, I’ll post more detailed findings from each of the 6 domain areas that we cover.